I would like to take the other Debian ISO DVD’s and copy them to my hard drive. What is the correct way in doing this so that Debian looks for the files on my hard drive first and if it does not find the file it then looks for the file on the Internet. So when I do an apt-get Install xxxx it looks on my pc first and then if it is not found there it downloads it from the Internet.
Helmut Grohne
[ Editor ]
Probably the easiest way to achieve this is to copy all the .deb files from your DVD to /var/cache/apt/archives. Due to the number of files, this might present problems for your file system (ext3?) which may have a limit on the number of files per directory. If this is the case, you should be able to recursively copy the complete DVD contents to a local directory and list a subdirectory as a “deb file:///…” line in your sources.list together with a regular network line. In this case make sure that your file:/// entry is listed before any network entry, because earlier entries are preferred (see sources.list(5)).